Next-Gen Automation for Insurance
OpCon Automation Knows What Insurance Companies Need
The pressure to prioritize enterprise-wide digital transformation has never been more intense for those in the insurance industry. To keep up with the modernization movement, insurance companies are asking more of their IT teams and creating increasingly complex environments yet missing out on the desired ROI of their modernization investments.
Businesses are coordinating the maintenance of legacy policy, billing, and claims systems while implementing cloud software, job schedulers, virtualization, homegrown scripts, and more. This balancing act is not only overwhelming, but it can also be very costly if it’s not executed carefully.
Enter OpCon—SMA’s modern-day workload automation solution that’s built with today’s IT challenges in mind. OpCon enables you to streamline your processes and eliminate manual tasks, so you can free up your IT staff—allowing them to focus on the strategic work your insurance business needs to keep up with the competition.
How Your Insurance Business Can Leverage the Power of OpCon
Orchestrate processes dependent on your policy, claims, and billing systems.
Let OpCon help manage your core system workflows, data, and files and finally enable hands-off, automated processes. With sophisticated scheduling options and dependency controls in OpCon, rest easy knowing dependent systems have the data they need at the right time.
Improve the efficiency and accuracy of your billing and payment processes.
Use OpCon's scheduling and data orchestration tools to optimize workflows and avoid waiting and inefficiencies. With OpCon, you can generate invoices, send payment reminders, reconcile premiums with policy records, and more, ensuring billing processes run accurately and automatically.
Speed up reporting and simplify auditing.
Get data to management for quicker decisions, finance for increased accuracy, and compliance for reporting and risk reduction. Facilitate reporting across your entire organization with OpCon's ability to move data within disparate systems to better manage the flow and frequency of your reporting or business intelligence tools.
Synchronize data and remove IT complexity from disparate and aging third-party systems.
Regardless of the age of your systems, help teams across your organization harmonize workflows and processes by using OpCon to pull data and files together from different servers, apps, and platforms, send notifications of any issues, and increase productivity.
Improve underwriting accuracy and quicken claims processing.
Automate the delivery of data relevant to underwriting and synchronize enterprise content management data at more frequent intervals to improve underwriting granularity and claims processing efficiency.
The Benefits of Workload Automation for Insurance Companies:
Enable Strategic IT Contributions
Automate the complex daily processes so IT staff have more time to contribute to the business, unlocking growth potential without increasing costs.
“OpCon proved so efficient that our operators have more time to take on more work,” says Kim Mehlhaff, IS Operations Manager at Noridian Mutual Insurance Company. “Over the years, OpCon has helped us grow our business without adding additional staff. Today, we have grown so complex and so large, that our business literally couldn’t run without OpCon.”
Massive Error Reduction
Before implementing OpCon, Noridian’s human operators managed over 800 processes per day, leading to an unacceptably high rate of human error. Thanks to OpCon’s event-driven automation, human intervention has been minimized and all of Noridian's jobs now run accurately, helping to prevent out-of-sequence errors.
Better ROI from Modernization
As insurers increasingly prioritize digital transformation, many have yet to see the expected benefits. OpCon enables better interoperability between disparate systems, including those across hybrid environments.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Workload automation brings unprecedented efficiencies into your insurance operations, helping to reduce staffing and other operational expenses and enable remarkably short payback periods.
Plus, OpCon offers fully transparent, easy-to-understand billing with no hidden fees, allowing you to forecast ROI for your business more accurately.
Better Reporting
Since it's built on a powerful SQL database, OpCon offers a virtually unlimited range of customized reporting options to meet any organization’s unique needs.
These dynamic reporting capabilities opened up a “world of possibilities” for Ameritas, one of the largest insurance holding companies in the U.S. with 4.9 million customers nationwide, according to Ed Watson, Systems Programmer. “Reporting will be a lot easier in the long run than it was with [our prior scheduler], which only offered a few canned reports but little customization.”
Less Downtime
OpCon is designed to run on dedicated servers, so your jobs can run even when the mainframe is down or undergoing routine maintenance.
“With [our prior scheduling solution], if we had to take the mainframe down, all our agents stopped running,” says Deb Brugma, Manager of the Operations Team at Ameritas. “With OpCon, if we need to conduct routine maintenance, our agents continue to run on their own, because they work independently from the mainframe.”
Crucial Disaster Recovery Protection
When Noridian Mutual Insurance Company’s main data center flooded, OpCon helped the insurer’s operations get back up and running in record time, with no jobs missed or run out of sequence.
Best-in-Market Automation Features and Functionality to Ensure Your Success
OpCon provides a broad set of sophisticated features that are incredibly easy to set up and use – allowing insurance businesses of all sizes to easily scale their automation across a wide range of various jobs. OpCon’s unique, best-in-market features include:
Event-Driven Commands
OpCon can receive events from any system and schedule jobs based on several variables. In essence, any system that can generate a text file can interact with OpCon.
Frequency Scheduling
Control triggers for when tasks run through rules instead of defined schedules to reduce errors and save time maintaining calendars.
Master/Daily Scheduling
Maintain jobs and the frequencies they run, providing visibility into what runs today and in the future.
Multi-Instance Scheduling
Reuse workflows with variable parameters to eliminate the need to create new workflows each time.
Advanced Failure Criteria
Control the most complex applications to create clean workflows and eliminate unexpected failures.
Expressions
Flexibly define the order of when tasks and processes run to provide superior control to help meet your business needs.
Fast, Easy Automation, with Minimal Coding Skills Required
SMA’s Self Service platform is designed specifically for business users to reduce your IT team’s workload. Non-IT users are able to trigger automated processes with the click of a button.
Plus, with OpCon’s low-code capabilities, most automation tasks can be done without having to write scripts - making it very simple to use, even for inexperienced staff. Did we also mention we offer free basic training, too?
Fast, Risk-free Deployment
SMA’s experienced teams can get automation up and running for your insurance business in weeks, not months. By employing a proven migration toolkit and templates, SMA has successfully migrated hundreds of thousands of jobs. This helps ensure that any migration from existing tools is fast and effective. Best of all, it helps you see value fast.
Automate Once and Scale Infinitely
A good rule of thumb: if you have to do something more than once, automate it.
Once you automate a business process, it’s like having your most reliable employee running it perfectly every single time. With OpCon’s advanced workload automation and orchestration solution, your IT staff has the power to set and forget an infinite number of processes, freeing them to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives for your organization. Just as importantly, automation significantly reduces the risk of error that comes with running processes manually.
Expertise to Guide You
SMA’s automation experts bring decades of experience automating complex business processes in insurance. We’ve got installation and migration from your existing, outdated scheduler down to a fine-tuned process. Our consultants can typically get your team fully trained and ready to go live with the automation of key back-office processes within weeks.
Maximizing Your ROI
SMA offers no-cost, unlimited basic training for the life of your contract. We know that getting a strong ROI requires earning the full confidence of your team, so we provide them with the necessary skills not only to run your core ERP processes, but to expand automation to other business units - creating even more value.
Schedule a Tour of OpCon
Let our experts demonstrate how easy OpCon is to install and operate. We’re ready to answer all your questions and show you why we’re the solution of choice for leading insurers.
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About SMA Technologies
SMA Technologies offers powerful, easy-to-use workload automation and orchestration software to eliminate manual tasks and manage workloads across business-critical operations. It's the perfect fit for financial institutions, insurance companies, and other transactional businesses. Many of our team members come from financial institutions and have personally experienced the power of OpCon. We exist to give you time back, so you can do what really matters. Whether that's implementing strategic business objectives or making it to your child's sports games, our automation makes it possible.